The Great Twitter Spam Hunt
Computers and Technology July 24th, 2008
So after several months of really lovin Twitter, they’ve finally made me sad…really sad. Yesterday, my modest roster of followers went from somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 or so to 81. And the number of people that I was following went from 183 or so to 113. Apparently this is part of Twitter’s way to combat Twitter spammers, those folks that mass follow thousands of Twitter users in hopes of getting a large following so they can bombard them with tweet spam. There’s a post on ReadWriteWeb about Twitter’s new anti-spam effort.
Was this move necessary? I don’t know. It’s pretty easy to ignore unwanted followers. Before you follow someone, check out their profile to see if they seem to be an interesting person to follow before you hit that “follow” button (Lesson #3 on my tips to finding interesting people to follow on Twitter). I’m quite sure there were some obvious spammers that needed to be purged from my followers list. You can easily spot who’s a spammer straight off by looking at their profile. If the great purge got rid of those turkeys then good riddance. But the point is, they didn’t bother me because I choose not to follow them in the first place.
I guess I’m a bit more upset about being automatically removed from some of the folks I was following. I’ve tried to only follow folks I’ve found interesting, so the fact that some of my follows may have been labeled as “spam”. Makes me sad.
Now, I’m not exactly sure how Twitter decided that a certain person needed to be “unfollowed” from whoever’s follow list. All I can hope for is that if you happened to be following me and find that I’ve disappeared, you can visit my profile and follow me again. And hopefully, I can someone find all the people that’s currently gone from my “following” list.
[Update] My followers/following counts are back to normal…thanks Twitter!
Image by Pearsonified
July 24th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Actually often you can find out who the spammers just being looking at the username. The convention of automatic spam seems to be a person’s name followed by a number (sometimes a year). Some examples I’ve received include: Chris1985, lisa1962, diane354, sarah717, Amy1974, karen4343, brandy454.
The biggest problem with these kinds of accounts is because of the use of the Tiny URL system you can click on something without having any idea what it might be. And potentially it could link to something malicious.
I always like to check out the profile and ‘block’ these users.
Interestingly a similar thing happened on YouTube once. The subscriber numbers on accounts fell dramatically. The official word from YouTube was that their counters hadn’t been operating correctly and that the new totals reflected something truer. After the initial shock, people played with the idea with great humour.
July 25th, 2008 at 10:37 am
According to Twitter there was no connection between the drop in Following/Followers and their anti-spam initiatives. They have also reported that most Followers/Following numbers has been restored for most people. Hopefully that includes you.